Defining Enterprise IAM


Enterprise Identity and Access Management (IAM) is process and technology to manage user objects for modest numbers of users (<1M) over multiple systems (5 -- 5K).

Enterprise IAM is different from B2C or Extranet IAM:

  • Must integrate with lots of systems, possibly with none being globally authoritative.
  • Must deal with lots of existing user objects -- no blank slates.
  • Must correlate existing user objects between systems.
  • Existing data is probably dirty -- orphan/dormant accounts, obsolete or simply wrong data, etc.